


Down In This Hole

by AcceleratedStall



Category: Persona 3
Genre: Conversation, Enemies to... well actually still enemies, Gen, Inconsequential Canon Divergence, POV Alternating, The Art of Lying, locked in a room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 03:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18984298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcceleratedStall/pseuds/AcceleratedStall
Summary: The end of the world looms in a matter of weeks. An unforeseen accident during the Dark Hour leaves Minato and Jin trapped with no one but each other for company - but it's too late to really change anything.





	Down In This Hole

“Not too strong,” Fuuka had said, but even at this late hour the prospect of a Shadow outside Tartarus has the whole team on edge. Minato has lost sight of them for the moment, but for now it’s enough just to know that the others are somewhere close by. He would be uneasy too, if there was a single second to think. Instead, sensations and reflexes pour into Minato’s mind unfiltered; the pounding of his shoes against cement as he sprints, the momentum of the spear gripped in his white-knuckled hand, Fuuka’s voice in his ears directing him through this unfamiliar, industrial section of Port Island. The Shadow slides into another alleyway just out of reach ahead of him, leaping and flitting from wall to ground to ceiling and back; substance without form, like a puddle of mercury. It congeals on a corrugated metal wall, creating from within itself a mask and the tips of strange, spectral fingers. With speed born from constant practice, Minato presses the cold metal tip of his Evoker to his temple, and pulls the trigger.

Kohryu bursts forth beside him, and surges forward with a roar, hurling a gale of wind at the Shadow. The attack lands true, but it’s not enough; reeling, the Shadow flees once more, hurling itself down the alley and around the next corner with uncanny speed. Minato tries to follow, but even his fastest strides feel like no more than stumbling. At last he reaches up, and grabs onto one of Kohryu’s horns; together they fling themselves around the corner and out onto a silent, green-tinged street.

Motion catches in the corner of Minato’s eye. Reflex moves faster than thought, commanding another burst of wind from Kohryu; the Persona instantly obliges, but something is wrong. Only after the attack does Minato recognize that the shape in front of him isn’t the Shadow they followed out of the alley, but before he can do anything else, he feels a crackle of electricity on the air, and a deep rumble from beneath his feet, and then - nothing at all.

-

He knew, straight away, that this wasn’t time - not yet. That didn’t mean the sudden flash of light and blast of hot air hadn’t been a surprise. Even more so, the scene Jin finds himself in the middle of afterwards. One of his hands brushes cold, dusty concrete; the other instinctively clutches a grenade - somehow he’d managed to keep his grip on it even unconscious. Pushing himself upright against a hard block wall, the haze in Jin’s mind begins to clear, and he takes in his surroundings.

He’s in a room, cramped and dark, no more than four meters square, finished in cement. Metal handholds leading upward along one wall suggest an exit above his head, a promise promptly denied by twisted steel bars and broken chunks of concrete in place of a ceiling. Trapped. Fucking wonderful. Still, assuming he’s underground Jin can’t be far below the street, because the green moon of the Dark Hour is still visible through gaps in the debris. A rusted metal valve handle protrudes from a thick pipe that divides the room into two halves; slumped on its other side is a familiar figure - Minato Arisato.

 

Jin’s eyes move first to the bright red armband - SEES. Were they after him? After months of fighting, it would be little shock if they were - but Arisato probably would have brought a weapon, not a broken wood pole, if he was trying to kill him. He might not look like much of a threat now, with his eyes closed, but some unconscious tension wells up in Jin anyway; his thumb moves to find the pin of his grenade.

Arisato’s eyes snap open. “Set that off in here and we’re both dead,” he says, quietly but with the tone of a command.

Jin’s instinct is to deny it - _don’t think you can teach me anything about grenades, fucker._ But he says nothing - the truth is, Arisato is probably right.

“I guess we kind of already are regardless, so pulling that pin wouldn’t amount to a whole lot in the end.” he continues, the firmness vanishing from his voice. “But we both have some things we need to do first, right?”

Again Jin says nothing, continuing to appraise Arisato with a cold stare.

He’s content enough to fill the silence himself, it seems. “So, tell you what. We call a truce until the others can get us out of here. You go your way and I’ll go mine. We still have it out, but we get to see Nyx before the end.”

“Hmph.” Jin’s lip curls in contempt, but it’s not altogether a terrible idea. Takaya still needs him.

Arisato looks like he has something else to say, but before he can speak, something interrupts him, and he turns away from Jin. Holding one finger to his ear and another up in the air vaguely in Jin’s direction, Arisato’s gestures are strangely unmistakeable - he’s looking at Jin the way a salaryman on the train would look at his companion while taking a cell phone call from a third party.

Jin listens intently as Arisato responds to his unseen interlocutor. “Calm down, Fuuka, I’m fine.” A pause. “Don’t know. I guess it might have been a gas explosion. Going to need some help getting out of here. Everyone else okay?”

Jin can’t hear the reply, but he can see a little of the tension in Arisato’s face fade away - even a tiny hint of a smile, but it doesn’t last. Instead, he sits up straight against the concrete, and calmly issues a set of orders to the rest of SEES, as though Jin isn’t sitting right across from him.

“Ken and Yukari, you two take Koro and track down that Shadow. Careful, it’s fast. Once you’re sure that’s done, try and find my Evoker, but if you can’t, don’t worry. Aigis, get to where I am and see if you can dig us out. Junpei and Akihiko, back her up.”

It might just be Jin’s imagination, but he’s pretty sure he sees Arisato throw a cold glance his way as he speaks those last two names in particular, an unspoken threat - _better stay on your best behavior. We can hold grudges too._

“I’m also not the only one trapped. Jin from Strega is here too-“ at this point Arisato pauses, perhaps to receive some incredulous statement from the other end of the line - “but I think we can reach an agreement for the time being.” This time he _definitely_ looked in Jin’s direction.

“Fuuka, you’d better keep an eye out for the other one, though. Mitsuru, keep her covered. If you can’t contact me for some reason, you’re in command.”

Having presumably accounted for everyone, Arisato releases a quiet sigh. “Last thing, Fuuka. If it’s close to the end of the Dark Hour and you haven’t gotten to me yet, go back to the dorm and pretend you were never here. Don’t need people asking what six Gekkoukan students in uniform were doing running around a factory complex after midnight, to say nothing of the rest of us.”

Jin hadn’t thought of that; he and Takaya were used to being suspicious. Arisato’s team actually pretended to be upstanding members of society - as if that wasn’t a total waste of time.

“Well,” Arisato glances aside. “That’s all I can do.”

 

It takes Jin a second to realize he was the one Arisato was talking to - he’d gotten a little distracted somehow. It was fascinating, in an odd way, to hear how much talking and coordination it apparently took to run SEES; with at most the three of them, Strega needed few words. Intuition was usually enough.

“Just don’t act like you’re doing me a favor,” he grumbles.

“Of course not,” Arisato answers, and silence falls on the little room.

-

With Fuuka’s assurance that the team is in action, Minato’s wave of adrenaline breaks and rolls back; his world shrinks back down again, to just this little square compartment under a manhole, and the teenager, not much older than him, staring sullenly his way from its other side. In defiance of the Dark Hour’s illogic, a little lamp in a cage to his right is still lit; it fills the room with an electric buzz and a sodium-orange glow, staining Jin’s jacket from its usual bright green to some new shade that Minato can’t quite place.

 

Time slows to a crawl. Minato pulls the sleeve of his jacket back and glances at his watch, counting down the Dark Hour - thirty-two minutes, twenty seven seconds, twenty six, twenty five…

“That thing works right now?” Jin’s voice doesn’t sound like Jin’s voice, and Minato turns to look at him with a start. Maybe because of this damp little cement room they’re stuck in, or maybe because of the fact that he’s only ever heard it shouting angrily while the two of them try to kill one another.

“Yeah, it does. Someone has to be keeping track,” Minato replies anyway. “Half an hour to go, by the way.”

Jin goes quiet again, his expression obscured by severe, rectangular-framed glasses. It occurs to Minato that he’s never really had time before to actually _look_ at the guy. He’s skinnier than his baggy clothes make him look - skinny and pale, though tall. Minato follows a loose thread down Jin’s arm - that jacket seems a little worn out - and reaches his hand, where his thumb plays with the pin of a grenade, flicking in and out of the little metal loop, which is only mildly unsettling.

 

He holds his tongue as long as he can, like Jin’s a stranger across from him on the bus, but then the grenade makes a tinny little _plink_ sound and Minato can’t keep his cool any longer. “Would you cut that out? You’re giving me the creeps,” Minato says.

“Hm?” Jin glances over to his side. He pauses, gives the grenade a small toss. “Oh, this. Habit. Didn’t realize I was doing it.”

Minato turns that statement over in his head - it seems a little hard to take at face value, but with Strega he supposes he can’t really be sure.

“Where do you get grenades, anyway?” Minato asks. His eyes go back to the explosive again - there’s an uneven metal seam across its circumference, and none of the parts seem to have the same finish.

“We don’t have people supplying us like you do,” Jin scoffs. “I made it myself.”

“Huh,” Minato’s brow raises, “that’s kind of impressive.”

“Not really. Matter of necessity. Takaya presses his own bullets too.”

Minato cracks a smile. “No, it is. You’ve been making your own hand grenades and you still have all ten fingers. That’s skill.”

Did that get a reaction out of him? Hard to tell.

-

Boredom makes people do weird shit. At least, that’s the only explanation Jin can think of for why he’s playing along - and for why Arisato is apparently trying to chat to begin with. He opens his mouth to say something else, but halts before any words come out. He makes another explicative gesture - Jin guesses SEES is trying to get through to him again.

“Good. Keep me posted,” Arisato says, into a radio or into Yamagishi’s brain or however the hell he’s doing it, and then he fixes Jin with a glance.

“Aigis is on the scene. Hopefully she can dig us out soon,” he explains. “Do you need anything? I can let the others know.”

There’s really no reason to answer him. Then again, there’s really no reason _not_ to answer him, either. There isn’t even anything too important in there tonight.

Jin pauses, clears his throat. “Could you find my briefcase? I must have dropped it.” He steels himself for an answer - but the worst Arisato can say is just “no,” and he’s certainly endured far worse than that.

Instead, he hears his message faithfully relayed. “Jin would like someone to find his briefcase,” Arisato says calmly.

Jin sinks beneath the collar of his jacket; instead of satisfaction, he feels a frustration struggling to find a voice. Arisato isn’t _angry_. Shouldn’t he be? And why does it bother Jin that he’s not?

It’s not exactly like he _wants_ to be berated, but every meeting of the cult he sets up for Takaya is full of nothing but empty, undeserved praise, like those idiots know the two of them at all, and the obsequious bleating makes his skin crawl. The Dark Hour, on the other hand, brooks few misconceptions; if there was one thing Jin thought he could be sure of hearing from Arisato Minato, it was that he was _wrong_. At least then they’d know where they stood - just slip into their mutual enmity like putting on an old coat.

 

To hell with it - this ambivalence is going to start showing up on his face eventually anyway.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” he asks, trying to sound curious rather than defensive.

“About what?” Arisato answers.

Jin sighs bitterly. “Don’t be stupid. How I should want Nyx and the Dark Hour gone, how righteous you are for fighting it. You should be preaching at me. Or blaming me.”

Arisato seems a little nonplussed. “Why?” At Jin’s pause he continues. “I’m not so naive as to think I could talk you out of however long you’ve spent with Takaya in twenty minutes.”

Arisato glances down at that wristwatch on his arm. “It’s not long now. Less than two weeks.” He smiles wryly. “Kind of …clarifies what’s important. We’re not even looking for anything that different, anymore.”

“What about revenge? Don’t you want to get back at me? Or Takaya?” Jin asks. He’s seen Arisato fight; guy isn’t fooling anyone with this Buddha act. Is he?

“Of course I do,” Arisato answers, and for a moment that tension, from when the two of them both woke up, is back. “Just… not enough time left for revenge now. Really,” he pauses, and seems to stare at something far beyond the concrete blocks at Jin’s back, “there never was.”

-

If Jin isn’t satisfied with Minato’s answer, he leaves his objections unvoiced. Quiet returns to the room, and the Dark Hour ticks away. Twenty-two minutes, dead. Twenty-one fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven…

 

There’s nothing Minato can really do to speed the rescue, at this point, but he can’t shake the urge to at least know what’s going on. He could, he supposes, check in with Fuuka up on the surface, but “I’m getting bored down here” isn’t a good enough reason to interrupt her if she’s scanning. He also thought it might be possible to catch a glimpse of the rest of the team though the little gaps in the debris over his head, but so far there’s been nothing to see.

Instead, Minato turns his head, and places one ear against the cold surface of the wall. There’s a faint scrape, and a thud; then a hydraulic sort of noise he thinks he’s heard before - maybe one of Aigis’ servos? Muffled voices follow; he closes his eyes and strains, but can’t make anything out.

 

“You asleep over there?” Compared to what he’s been trying to hear, Jin’s voice may as well have come out of a bullhorn. Minato makes a noise he can’t exactly describe, somewhere between a laugh, a snort, and a yelp. He turns just in time to catch Jin’s grin before it fades.

“Guess I kind of set myself up for that,” Minato concedes with a sigh. “Still. Not a whole lot else to do. Shiritori?”

“Do I look like an idiot?” Jin shoots back.

“Mmm, suit yourself.”

Jin pulls off his glasses and starts wiping them down with the sleeve of his jacket, his face turned downward. At that the conversation dies again, though Minato hadn’t really been expecting it to continue.

 

Eighteen minutes.

-

They really aren’t getting any cleaner, after a certain point, but it’s not until he shivers and almost drops them that Jin has to stop wiping his glasses. Not that he likes them, but they’re still necessary. The concrete against his back is starting to chill through his jacket; he leans forward and shifts his weight a little to try and get a little more comfortable.

 

Apparently Arisato picks up on the movement. “If you’re looking for something to do,” he begins with a hint of slyness, “you could always help me come up with a good lie.”

“What?” Jin isn’t sure what angle he’s trying to work, but it probably won’t be as dumb as playing shiritori, so fuck it.

“If we’re not out of here before the Dark Hour ends, we’ll get dug out by the local fire brigade or whoever, and they’ll ask us what happened. I could tell the truth, but I really don’t think they’d buy it,” Arisato answers.

“What’s it matter? Kirijo can lie their asses off for you, can’t they?” Jin asks in response, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice.

“Kind of. Official explanations,” - and Arisato’s cadence, carefully emphasizing those two words, tells Jin he knows exactly what he’s saying - “require a little time. Phone calls to make, stories to get straight, and all that. Until then, it’s on us to explain what we were doing after hours outside an air conditioner factory when the street exploded for no reason.”

“Air conditioner factory, huh?” Not like it mattered, but that strikes Jin as a strange detail to pick up on.

“Well it might have been refrigerators or toasters. I wasn’t really paying much attention. The point is that-” He cuts himself off. “Actually, what would someone who doesn’t experience the Dark Hour even see? A pile of rubble just appearing from nowhere?”

“No idea,” Jin answers. There’s no use trying to make sense of it - Jin has given himself enough headaches trying.

“Might be easier to just say we were unconscious the whole time and woke up like this, than to try and guess what someone else would have seen,” Arisato suggests.

“Gotta be careful with that, could come across as too convenient.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Arisato pauses for a moment in thought.

“That doesn’t mean it can’t work, though,” Jin continues. “Just make the convenience less obvious.”

“Which means what?”

Now it’s Jin’s turn to stop and think for a second. “A distraction. Make the least important part of the story the most exciting part, and people will focus on that instead.”

“Ah, okay. Maybe we could say we got beaten senseless by delinquents. Do we look scruffy enough to sell that?”

“Doubt it. I could give you a black eye, if you think that would help.” Hearing that seems to amuse Minato - wait, when did he become Minato? Putting that thought aside, Jin continues. “Besides that though, the more other people in the story, the easier it is to check. And a lot of people get into fights, that might not be enough of a diversion by itself.”

“Alright, something a little further out then. We’re two lovers on a tryst, who got lost trying to find a shortcut to Shirakawa Boulevard.”Jin has to give Minato some credit for keeping his expression so neutral while saying that - maybe he’s cut out for this lying business after all.

Even so. “Nope. We’ve got no chemistry.”

“True,” Minato admits, still stone faced.

 

They stare at each other again for a moment. “Actually, that gives me an idea,” Jin says. “You know that club at the mall, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We could say they got us drunk there, and we passed out while trying to stagger home.” Jin counts off on his fingers. “First, it’s a juicy scandal. Second, it’ll probably be thought of as someone else’s fault. Third, it’s a plausible explanation for missing important details.”

“Could work,” Minato nods. “But they won’t smell it on our breath, though.”

“That’s not important. No one checks to see if a drunk guy is actually-“

 

Suddenly there’s a rumble, and a hole opens to the sky above them. New voices - at last! - filter in along with the green moonlight.

“Targets identified.” That would be the robot.

“Sorry to keep you waiting!” Iori. Jin feels a wash of bitterness at recognizing his voice.

 

Soon the voices are joined by faces, peering down at them. A long steel beam extends downward into the little room, settling onto the concrete with a jarring _clank_.

“You first,” says Arisato.

“Really?”

“I don’t want to give the impression that we’re going to leave you down here.”

 

Jin climbs awkwardly over the pipe running through the center of the room, willing a bit more life back into his stiff legs, and then carefully begins to crawl up the metal beam. It shouldn’t be hard, but something about being watched by at least three people and one robot is a little offputting, and about two-thirds of the way up, he finds one foot slipping.

For a brief instant, his leg dangles in the air; then, another arm grabs his own, pulling him upwards. The grip below his wrist is hard, and devoid of warmth; Jin instinctively tenses as his heart races into his throat and a cold sweat beads up on his brow. Yet no blow ever lands; instead, their robot, whatever her name is, Apex or Glacis or whatever, neatly pivots around and deposits him on an unbroken section of pavement.

 

Wordlessly she turns from him to retrieve Arisato, leaving Jin to take a deep breath as he returns to the wider world. He must not be totally luckless after all, because judging by the amount of broken concrete and twisted rebar covering the street, the explosion he and Arisato got caught in was substantial. Most of the rest of SEES forms a loose ring around the hole he just got pulled out of; Jin can’t tell if the dominant feeling as they look at him is suspicion or curiosity. A glance to his left reveals his briefcase, battered but whole; he picks it up and feels the familiar contours of its handle.

 

Finally Arisato himself emerges, given a hand by the robot much like Jin was. He looks around, dusts himself off, and gives Jin a solid look in the eye. “We’ve held up our bargain. Now’s when we part ways, I guess.” He hesitates, looks at the ground, and seems to make some kind of mental shrug, before adding one more thing: “See you soon.”

There’s no use in prolonging the moment. Jin turns on his heel and walks towards an undamaged section of street without a word - alone again, in spirit and soon in fact. Perhaps not all the cold that sets in as he walks can be blamed on the wintertime.

-

They’ll need to hurry on back to the dorm now; the end of the Dark Hour beckons. With the greatest speed that their fatigue permits, SEES starts out in the opposite direction from the one Jin traveled; the street leads to a gate, marked with a yellow sign - “AREA UNDER 24-HOUR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.” Nothing there about any extra hours, Minato supposes. The whole group begins to climb over, Akihiko giving Ken a boost and Koromaru patiently awaiting someone to lift him.

As he reaches the top of the gate, Minato spares a final look back. Apart from the debris, the street is empty and totally silent; there aren’t even any of the Dark Hour’s familiar black coffins, thankfully. Further down, a figure in a green jacket turns into an alleyway and disappears from view; a young man that Minato almost knew.

Of course there wasn’t enough time.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is probably one of the weirder things I've written in a while, and it ended up longer than I really had in mind. Sorry about that. It's heavily inspired by an old Livejournal fill called "Honor Amongst Thieves," so thanks to whatever anonymous author was responsible for that.


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